Dell EMC Brings IT Automation to Low-End Storage Arrays

The only way most organizations have been able to cope with exponential increases in the amount of data that needs to be managed is to rely more on automation. Most of the automation software, however, has only been made available on high-end storage systems.

Dell EMC today announced an SC Series v3000 array priced starting at $10,000 that provides automated tiering between solid-state drives and magnetic drives, compression, as well as support for date replication and volume migrations. Other capabilities include support for thin clones, enterprise chargeback tools, and a management interface that is shared with Dell EMC EqualLogic storage arrays.

Bob Fine, director of product marketing for midrange storage at Dell EMC, says the SC v3000 marks the first time advanced storage automation technologies are being made available for small-to-medium enterprises.

“Smaller organizations have the same needs as a larger enterprise,” says Fine. “They just have littler budgets.”

Fine says the SC v3000 is 50 percent faster than the previous generations of arrays Dell EMC offered at this price point in addition to providing access to twice as much memory and three times the storage capacity. Maximum capacity for the SC v3000 is just over a petabyte.

Despite the rise of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliances that combine compute and storage, Fine says, Dell EMC is still seeing significant demand for storage arrays. Most legacy applications sill expect to invoke a storage array, notes Fine.

It used to be that the only thing that mattered when it came to storage was performance. But given the amount of data that now needs to be managed, the time and effort needed to manage storage has become a significant issue. As storage becomes more automated, the need for a dedicated storage administrator is sharply reduced inside many organizations. In fact, the reduced amount of time spent managing storage might very well justify the cost of the upgrade alone.